I just read the comment thread at Assistant Village Idiot. The commenters there, including Steve, thought it was real. In Steve and those commenters' defense, if this is the first time you've seen one of these types of clips, it's easy to think that it's real. But these types of clips have been around for a while, so if you've seen them before, usually you can tell it's fake.

A related fake sports clip are the multiple full court basketball shots:

Steve had recently read Dave Epstein's "The Sports Gene" which talks about the heightened physical abilities of professional athletes. For example, Epstein talks about baseball players' tendency to have very good eyesight, such as more than half of the Dodgers having 20/10 eyesight, which seems even more extraordinary in this day and age when it seems almost everyone suffers from some degree of myopia. And here's a clip which Steve sees shortly after which appears to confirm, in a spectacular way, the points of a book fresh in his mind.

I did VFX in Hollywood for a couple years, and I was obsessed with exactly this kind of viral stuff for a long time before that. Watching it again, there are some clear giveaways:

-the "correspondent" doesn't quite look the part (could be a combination of hair/makeup/lighting)

-there are no media logos anywhere

-there's an unnatural sound effect right when he catches the ball; this is an old trick that goes back to at least the original Star Wars, where the sound effect helps distract from the visual effect and helps you not see its fakeness (try watching Star Wars on mute and suddenly it will look much cheaper)

-the catch itself isn't believable, even for a pro ballplayer. It would have been better if he'd idly glanced towards the batter just as he swung.

But, like Longoria said, they shot it in about 5 minutes. My guess is it was just an idea they came up with at the end of the day and they didn't want to get into diminishing returns by planning the whole thing too carefully.

"I did VFX in Hollywood for a couple years, and I was obsessed with exactly this kind of viral stuff for a long time before that. Watching it again, there are some clear giveaways"

yeah, like, you can literally see the real ball come off the bat for a split second and fly into the field of play as a grounder. they didn't even bother to edit out the real ball out for like 1 or 2 frames.

terrible effects here, like most of what i see on television and, incredibly, in movies. effects have gotten worse over the last 10 years. yet somehow, they seem to cost twice as much.

have effects guys caught onto the scam that lawyers have been running for decades now? gotta increase those billable hours, final product is secondary to dollars earned.

terrible effects here, like most of what i see on television and, incredibly, in movies. effects have gotten worse over the last 10 years. yet somehow, they seem to cost twice as much.

Sort of like Nobel prizes in the sciences over the past decade, right Jody?

Are you ever going to point out these "terrible effects" over the last 10 years? Or are you just going to say you did while never actually doing so, just like with all the numerous "head scratchers" in the Nobel prizes in the sciences over the past decade?

I think the VFX in movies are mostly really impressive these days. More often, it's the concept behind them, or the reasoning for using them at all, that's weak or implausible.

As for money, the skills needed to create visual effects are very rare and highly specialized. Combine that with the fact that it sometimes requires whole companies, and months of those companies' rendering time, just to produce effects that appear onscreen for a few seconds. It's easy to see why the costs are so astronomical.

Those companies, by the way, are not usually fun to work at. Long, unusual hours, and the guys at the bottom don't make very much. The companies bid fiercely among each other. One rather prominent VFX company got into trouble recently for outbidding everyone else and then tricking students at Full Sail into doing the work for no pay.

That said, there are now kids in middle school who are quickly gaining on the pros, skillwise, because they don't have to support themselves and they can just dick around on their laptops in their free time checking out the wealth of free tutorials that are out there. Plus, home computing power is still growing fast. I think these kids will be competing with professionals for serious industry work before they're out of high school, so the professionals can expect to have to lower their bids. (Kinda glad I'm not in the industry anymore...)

Which brings me back to my first point, which is that at the end of the day it's really the concept that counts. You can be sure there will be someone out there who's able to execute any concept, but if the concept is dumb in the first place then the whole thing will suck. That's one advantage people like me have over the young'uns.

That reminds me of the boy who calls himself roissy on the pick up artist site who used to post endless videos of public marriage proposal rejections where the poor dumb White guy gets rejected in front of the entire crowd on the Jumbotron.

They were all obviously fake, usually a stunt by a radio station or whatever, yet he swore they were genuine because of course it just reinforced his beta male sexual inadequacy and bitterness toward women.

It was his way of saying "See I told you that women can't be trusted. They only want bad boys not beta husbands".

I don't know what you falling for this says about you.

Maybe you're just an oldster and aren't on guard enough for the latest digital trickery.

Maybe you're just an oldster and aren't on guard enough for the latest digital trickery.

These types of fake viral videos have been around for a few years now. A lot of people fall for them if it's their first time seeing such a vid. After the first time, people can usually tell when they see a fake viral vid.

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